The American Promise
Just as the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 had fufilled to secure full legal rights for the freed slaves, so the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not ensure the slaves' descendants their rightful place in society. In the 1860s, Congress had felt compelled to propose the Fifteenth Amendment to prevent states from restricting the ballot on the basis of race. Now, a century later, the time had come to make that promise a reality.
Civil rights leaders understood that laws and court decisions prohibiting legally enforced discrimination would never, by themselves, make African Americans full participants in the nation's political life. Blacks would have to gain greater access to the voting booth if they were to achicve greater economic and political equality.
Title I of the 1964 Civil Rights Act did attack state discrimination in voter registration, but despite its tough language, it changed little in the South. The Justice Department just did not have the personnel to monitor every county, and intimidated blacks were often afraid to employ the act's remedies. The continuing resistance of southern leaders kept black registration low; in Mississippi, for example, less than 6 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote.
But time was running out on the South. The summer of 1964, known as Freedom Summer, not only saw the passage of the great civil rights bill, but it also saw unparalleled violence that, in the end, convinced the rest of the country that the time had come to act. In the most infamous case, three civil rights volunteers who had come to Mississippi to help register black voters--two whites, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and one black, James Chaney--were murdered, and their bodies hidden in an earthen dam. FBI investigations found that local law enforcement officials had been involved in the crime.
President Johnson had ordered work begun on a tough voting rights bill in the fall of 1964, and he asked Congress for the measure in his State of the Union speech in January 1965. Congress stalled, and in March, Martin Luther King led a march on Selma, Alabama, to dramatize the need for a voting rights bill. Alabama officials brutally attacked the marchers, and police violence, shown on national television, sickened the country; within hours, tens of thousands of volunteers were heading south to join King in the march.
In the midst of the crisis, the president delivered the following message to Congress. Many scholars of the period believe it was Johnson's greatest speech, not only moving and eloquent, but a perfect example of using what Theodore Roosevelt had called the "bully pulpit," the moral authority of the presidency as a platform for leading the American democracy. The combination of public revulsion over southern white violence and Johnson's political skills brought Congress to pass the voting rights bill on August 5, 1965.
The new law, known either as the Civil Rights Act of 1965 or as the Voting Rights Act (if 1965, brought an unprecedented federal intrusion into local affairs, especially in the South. Voting registration and criteria had always been considered a matter of local and state control. Now if any county failed to register 50 percent of the voting age population, that would be considered prima facie evidence of racial discrimination, and the Justice Department would take over control of the registration process. The law worked. Most southern states realized that they had reached the end of the line in their efforts to retain a segregated society, and voluntarily opened their registration lists to blacks. The Justice Department took control in sixty-two counties where resistance remained. In Mississippi, the state with the worst voting registration record, enrollment of black voters jumped from 6 to 44 percent in three years. Within a relatively short time, blacks, who comprised a majority in parts of the South, were electing black mayors and sheriffs and supervisors. And former race baiters like George Wallace of Alabama would actively campaign for black votes. The credit belongs not only to the civil rights workers who put their bodies and their lives on the line, and to the civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., who aroused public consciousness, but in large measure to Lyndon Johnson. In this speech he managed to articulate not only blacks' desire to become full citizens, but the awareness that in a democratic society nothing else would suffice.
Few who heard the speech were not moved when Johnson quoted the old hymn that had become the anthem of the civil rights movement, "We shall overcome!"
For further reading: David Garrow, Protest at Selma (1978); Doug McAdam, Freedom summer (1988); and Stephen lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1966-1969 (1976)
"THE AMERICAN PROMISE"
Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the Congress:
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the desony of democracy.I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight.
For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government--the Government of the greatest Nation on earth.
Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.
In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation.
The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.
For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans--not as Democrats or Republicans -- we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.
This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: "All men are created equal" -- "government by consent of the governed" -- "give me liberty or give me death." Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries, and tonight around the world they stand there as guardians of our liberty, risking their lives.
Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man. This dignity cannot be found in a man's possessions; it cannot be found in his power, or in his position. It really rests on his right to be treated as a man equal in opportunity to all others. It says that he shall share in freedom, he shall choose his leaders, educate his children, and provide for his family according to his ability and his merits as a human being.
To apply any other test--to deny a man his hopes because of his color or race, his religion or the place of his birth--is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.
Source: Lyndon B. Johnson, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, vol. I (1965), 281.